I doesn't go back to HyperCard, since HC had no native html
capabilities. It does go back to MetaCard, and I vaguely recall some
of the header level tags being italic back then. I suspect this was
modelled on the most common browser interpretations at the time, which
has changed quite a bit since then. It's been, what, 20 years?
Indeed - I think this is perhaps the most likely explanation.
As it turns out a very similar issue was reported recently with regard
use of named colors and their RGB mappings (Bug 15621). The mapping the
engine uses for those seems to have been defined relative to a specific
UNIX terminal / display / X11 implementation which is not quite the same
as what has become the 'defacto' X11 standard mappings (the X11 standard
only ever gave informative values for them, rather than normative ones).
The solution in both cases is not to change the current mappings, but
instead to (at some point) make the mappings configurable at runtime. Of
course, the rub here is that this causes a global interoperability
problem which is not (at this time) clear how to resolve. i.e. In the
IDE you could be editing two 'applications' at once both of which want
different settings. (Note that keying this at the stack level isn't
necessarily correct as stacks can be used as libraries in different
contexts - there needs to be some notion of 'project scope' which would
arbitrate what mappings were used when).
In any case, I've updated both bug reports to reflect this - i.e. as an
enhancement to allow these things to be configurable at runtime.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ [email protected] ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps
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